Tuesday June 1st update

Hi Everyone!

First of all, let’s give it up for my two followers on Blogger! Alright!!!!

Now down to business. Sunday night I finished most of my preparation in terms of finding contact information for the Media and community organizations.

Monday March 31st I worked all day, and came home to greet the pent up frustration of my laptop that has been running slow lately - talk about timing right, but I still managed to finalize most of my sponsorship package and get a little bit of practice on my marketing speech.

Tuesday June 1st. Today was a big day for me, I booked the entire day off and this is what I accomplished:

1. Note to self: I didn’t end up speaking to an actual human being until around 8:30-8:45. No one was in their offices at 8, so I don’t think I’ll start making calls until that time in the future.

2. The Media contacts went fairly well, most people were at least interested enough to tell me to email them a Press Release and the rest of the information on the mission.

List of contacted media: London Free Press, Chorus Entertainment Co (AM 980, FM 96 etc), A Channel News, The Londoner, Lakeshore Advance, InteroBang (Fanshawe Paper), Astro Radio Group ( 97.5, AM 1290 etc), Grand Bend Strip, Western News

3. One big event today was attained through 'The Londoner' which is distributed on a weekly basis and generally targets the 38-50 age range, and families. The reporter I talked to was interested enough to set up an interview this afternoon! At 2pm I went in and had a good 1/2 hour interview with him. Everything went really well and he said that, assuming it passes through the editors, it should be in next week’s edition! So that was huge for me. It felt good to see that I could get people excited about what GV does, and what we're going to be doing in China.

4. I Called my MPP's (MLA's outside of Ontario), Mayor's, University President's and Faculty Dean's office - All requested Press Releases etc, but at least now I've made contact they can't ignore me :)

5. Contacted the London Legion, Rotary Club, Local Lion's Clubs, HKCBA, Ministry of Trade and Development, Canadian Youth Business Foundation, Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development Agency

6. Out of all the positive work that came out of today, I should have expected that it couldn't all go well. Around 4 PM, my contact from the Canadian Youth Business Foundation called me back and though he was interested in Global Vision and JTC he said that due to government cut backs and the fact that they are a not for profit organization, they could not help sponsor the mission - which is unfortunate.

I realized something though, which was reiterated by friends; we have all come this far on the Less Travelled Road because we WILL NOT let bumps in the road stop us from reaching our goals. This won’t be the last rejection I get from potential sponsors, not by a long shot, so I choose to look at this as a learning experience and hopefully it will help me next time.

7. So what are my plans now? Now it’s time to switch gears and focus more on finding individual businesses who may act as corporate partners.

First things first though, I need to send out several copies of my sponsorship package and follow up and the messages that I've left for people.

That’s all for now!

Robert